“A real love letter is made of insight, understanding, and compassion. Otherwise it’s not a love letter. A true love letter can produce a transformation in the other person, and therefore in the world. But before it produces a transformation in the other person, it has to produce a transformation within us. Some letters may take the whole of our lifetime to write.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh
Dear Alan ~
Considering all my supposed vanity, how strange that this should be the first letter I’ve written to myself. For all the self-help techniques espoused by new-age writers, somehow I’ve managed to avoid the vain indulgence of such an exercise, because it always felt pointless to put down in words the silly things I voice to myself internally. That inner-dialogue is persistently consistent, pausing only for meditation and sleep, so there never seemed a need to translate it into written form. Strange for someone who purports to love writing…
I think I’ve also left you alone for all these years because I sort of assumed you could take care of yourself. You always have, even as a young child. When left to your own devices you would find ways of mentally entertaining and surviving various difficult predicaments – the typical pratfalls of childhood – through wit and whimsy and make-believe. Your imagination ran wild from your earliest days, and it remains one of the most potent exit strategies for an increasingly-worrisome world. I reserve my deepest pity and sympathy for those young creatures who have bartered their imagination for a cel phone and screen time. How sad to be so disconnected from the world! On your 50th birthday, I think you deserve a small pat on the back for maintaining your connection to nature – to plants and animals and the wonder and beauty of any given day. May it prove as reliable for comfort for the next fifty years as it has for the first…
I know you didn’t want to celebrate fifty in any grand or bombastic way – too typical, too predictable, too much like too many others – but you need to hear what I’m saying.
Do you hear what I’m saying?
Do you know what I’m saying?
Those words once rang in your head during your first year of college, when you thought you were going crazy, when you thought you might not last. That’s partly why I insist upon you honoring this day: because there were moments – several of them – when you almost chose not to be here. You came close to snuffing out all the goodness and awfulness and sweetness and sadness of these wonderfully wickedly woefully wildly winsomely few decades that followed the darkness. That choice – that option to be or not to be – has occasionally reared its head, and thus far whatever angel or spirit or sliver of self-worth that perches on your shoulder has guided you right on all your ways. You cannot take reaching this age for granted, because I know all of the struggles that sometimes barely brought you to this point.
Perhaps I should have written to you sooner. There were so many moments when you needed someone – anyone – so badly, and I let you do it all on your own. I thought it would make you stronger. I thought it would help you survive. And maybe all it did was come close to killing you. I’m sorry for that, I’m sorry I left you to fend for yourself all these years, I’m sorry I wasn’t there… even when I was.
Despite my absence and despite my silence, or perhaps because of them, my faith in you never wavered, and you turned out all right. I know you don’t always think that. You’re still too hard on yourself, but you’re getting better about it. That’s difficult, because I also know there were pivotal moments when you should have had unconditional, unwavering, and unquestionable love, and it simply wasn’t there. When you lack that at certain key steps, it’s almost impossible to make up for it on your own. There’s only one word that matters in that sentence though: almost.
And so, in however many years that may follow this half-century demarcation point, I want you to remember all the possibility and opportunity that ‘almost’ affords, remember all the hope and power that reside in a ‘maybe’, and remember all the love that lives within your ‘self’. Going forward, that’s all you’ll ever need.
Happy birthday my friend. ~ A.
“I have lost my smile,
but don’t worry.
The dandelion has it.”
~ Thich Nhat Hanh
